All posts tagged Writing

Ceci has never had much of anything. Growing up on the mean streets of Brazil, he has fought every day of his short life – a life that is soon to come to an end…or is it? When Ceci wakes up in an empty operating theatre in Buenos Aires with no recollection of how he got there, strange things start to happen. Finding a mysterious key and discovering a hidden world beneath the hospital where strange becomes downright weird, Ceci soon finds out that maybe his life is worth more than he thought – but to whom?

Louis Ortega, aka The Hierophant, wants Ceci’s soul –wants his colour—his and the rest of the indigo kids’. Ortega has a plan and with the help of his faithful-but-misguided mercenaries, will stop at nothing to achieve it. With his dark prince and master surgeon, Raphael by his side, Ortega continues his quest to steal the colour from the world and use it for his own means – but Ortega didn’t bank on the power of the kids or their special gifts. Slowly, but surely, they are opening their hearts and minds and in doing so, discovering things about themselves they never knew – with their colours, comes power. Ceci is about to find out that he has allies – friends. From the wondrous Jax and the geeky Hadi, to the glittering green girl, Harmony and the adventurous Starr, to the ones he is yet to meet, it soon becomes apparent that for the first time ever, he isn’t alone.

What do a long-haired, middle-aged teacher/writer/trampolining expert residing in West Africa; a thirty-something football-mad scribe and snowboarding loud-mouth with a penchant for beer and Ray Ban’s; a self-proclaimed neek (50% nerd, 50% geek) and super-hero wannabe (special powers – multi-instrumentalism) and a poem-writing, bibliophillic boarder (school, not snow) have in common?

The new Young Adult/Teen mystery from Miriam Joy, Charley Robson & Saffina Desforges

How could the universe throw such peeps into the melting pot and not expect chaos to ensue? And what would they come up with? Who are these people?

We all love a good mystery right?

Okay, before I introduce Miriam and Charley (because you already know the front and back end of the Saffna Desforgespantomime horse intimately), hands up those of you who can work out which one is which of us from the opening descriptions?

I bet you all thought that I was the quiet one and that Mark ‘Zebedee’ Williams liked the odd chilled glass of Stella right?

Sorry to disappoint, but Mr Williams doesn’t get anywhere near enough snow to be a boarder where he is! 😉

So what of these crazy teen writers that we have gone and got ourselves embroiled with then? Who are they? How did we meet? And what do they do?

Say hello to Miriam Joy (of neek and super-hero fame):

Double prosperity

Look, she admits she’s a geek, okay! Anyway, don’t take my word for it, here’s a few words from her royal-neekness herself:

Miriam Joy has lived all her life in South-East London, plodding through the state education system, and has got as far as AS levels: English Lit, French, Music and Classical Civilisations.

Never one to make things easy on herself, she plays three instruments (violin, flute and piccolo), does both archery and ballet, and is learning two dead languages and a made-up one on top of her schoolwork. She also makes YouTube videos and answers emails for the Teens Can Write Too blog, and still manages to find time to procrastinate.
She also has an obsession with mythology, mainly Celtic and Norse, which started at the age of eleven. Far from ‘growing out of it’ as most people expected, she has simply become more knowledgeable, or as her parents call it, weird.

You can also read another blog interview with Miriam on St Mall’s and collaboration here.

So who is this fellow-geek and trekkie-cum-Sherlockian, Charley that she mentions?

This is what Miss Robson had to say about herself when I battered her repeatedly with a virtual lacrosse stick asked her to jot a few lines down (they’re sooo cool these girls, that they already refer to themselves in the third person. I’m surprised they don’t have a middle initial!):

Charley Robson is a student, geek and bibliophile, and has passed the majority of her education in a private Dorset boarding school. She has been writing “seriously” for around eight years; at thirteen, she began writing a high fantasy novel that spawned into her very first trilogy – which, despite its flaws, she is still very proud of. She credits the fantastical works of myriad fantasy authors, both from childhood and into her ever-approaching adulthood, for her enduring devotion to the genre.

Outside of fiction, Charley is also a fairly prolific poet – one of her poems was awarded a place in the Top Twenty of a Daily Telegraph poetry competition in 2010 – and enjoys writing articles for her school magazine. In 2012 she also followed up on a keen interest in theatre and acting by writing a pantomime for performance in the annual school Drama competition.

St Mallory’s Forever! marks Charley’s first foray into the mystery genre, something she has long admired but eternally struggled to concoct plots for. St Mallory’s has also marked Charley’s first serious escapade into co-writing, and the mechanics of the publishing world at large.

Oops! Almost forgot – this is Charley:

She’s a poet and she knows it

What other amazing facts can I share?

Oh yeah: These two new kids on the block are still at school.

Miriam will just have turned 17 by the time St Mall’s goes live, how cool is that? We are thrilled to have been able to work with them and assist on this project. It has been great fun and I have no doubt that kids, teens and adults alike will love St Mallory’s as much as we loved helping them write it!

So what’s it about?

Well, St Mallory’s Forever! is a good old, warm and fuzzy mystery novel. Set in an imaginary boarding school (think Malory Towers and St Clare’s), but written as blog posts from the point of view of three girl boarders. Here’s the unofficial blurb…

When her mother becomes head of music at St Mallory’s School for Girls, Helen is uprooted from her London comprehensive to start a new life in a totally alien environment – a boarding school. But before long, the behaviour of the other girls is the least of her problems: Helen picks up a piece of rare music from a shop in Brighton, and suddenly she is at the centre of what seems to be an enormous …conspiracy.The bursar is behaving suspiciously. Her mother is lying to her. And now Tim Morrigan, a boy from the partner school, is getting involved. Do they all want the music, or are there other motives in play? And since the music appears to have been written after the composer’s death, is it real, or simply an elaborate fake?Accompanied by Abigail Roe, a veteran student with a penchant for Shakespeare and geek culture references, and Xuan Liu, the well-travelled daughter of a Chinese diplomat, Helen sets out to solve the mystery. But homework, lacrosse matches, and morally ambiguous members of staff all seem to be determined to stop them.

We are frantically trying to get this ready for early next week – mouse power and weather permitting, so please bear with us whilst we do.

But, if Mr Williams insisits on spending all his time bouncing on trampoline with the local kids, don’t hold your breath! 😉

Mark hard at work on St Mallory’s

In the meantime, head over to the facebook page here and show some love by clicking ‘like’.

And those totals are just for Sugar & Spice. I haven’t tallied up the sales for the other books, but it’s fair to say we are within kissing distance of a QUARTER OF A MILLION SALES.

Let me repeat that: 250,000 people have downloaded our books.

That would fill Old Trafford 3.3 times over.

They call OT The Theatre of Dreams.

It is certainly a place where you can live out your fantasies and leave life behind for an hour and a half. I know. I’ve done it many times. What I didn’t ever dare dream about, was that, one day, people would want to read what I had written. That the inner-bowels of my imagination, spilled out onto the page like a gutted pumpkin, would interest anyone.

Twenty four months ago (that is 730 days, 17531.6 hours) Mark Williams and I had a dream.

We dreamt that if the agents daren’t take on our book, that the public might give it a chance. They might read it. Hell, they might even enjoy it!

I just came across some old emails. One of them, was a rejection from our now hard-working agent. She loved the book, but daren’t take it on. Then the ebook revolution started and publishing changed forever. The gatekeepers realised (well, some of them) that they didn’t hold the only key anymore. Hey, newsflash! The readers will decide! Look at Twilight and Fifty Shades. (I’ll just dump this rather heavy case right here shall I?)

Have a look at this:

I made up a name. A name that no-one else had, that would only link to us on the search engines. It is no secret that the name was a combination of my fave character from Ab Fab and the surname of someone I worked with that I rather liked.

I made this cover myself. No-one had ever heard of us.

I spent 3 days working out the HTML coding for formatting the book. I took a tutorial on how to work out KDP. I started a blog. I did interviews for other blogs. I joined a million sites, set up a facebook account, I tweeted, I actually started to think that one person might want to read what I/we had written. Then…

NOTHING HAPPENED.

What??? Are you insane? We have just published a book that was over ten years in the making. Our blood, guts and glory are woven into every word that has spilled out onto that page. What do you mean you don’t want to read it?

Me and this shy, long-haired, latte-guzzling bloke that I met on the net have something to say, you WILL listen! 😉

And listen you did – eventually.

After some meagre and frankly embarrassing sales figures for the first 4-5 months, Sugar & Spice took off and we have never looked back. We hit the number two spot on Amazon UK and I THINK, we were even number one for a brief hour, losing out on the top spot to Gordon Ferris and his Hanging Shed. We were the first indies to ever hit that spot and we stayed in the Top 100 for over three months until Amazon mysteriously ‘lost’ our book for almost four weeks. Who knows how long it might have stayed there? Anyway, despite that minor blip, Sugar & Spice has been in the Top 100 of its category ever since and we still sell 100s of copies a month. It reached number two in the Waterstones chart and is still at number 5 in Police Procedurals on Kobo. It has since been translated and published in France as Paraphilia.

We owe a lot to that book. We owe a lot to each other, Mark and I.

Speaking of my partner in crime (literally), I found this today. This was one of the first email exchanges between Mark and myself after he had reviewed Equilibrium (now called Dark Halo and STILL not finished!) on youwriteon and we began talking. How polite we were to each other back then! 😉

Hi Mark,

Nice to have a bit of information to put to the name!

Many thanks for the link to your blog, I will be reading regularly from now on and will take your advice on writing my own.

I have always been a tad wary of venturing into the social vamp scene as I was unsure of how much of Equilibrium to put ‘out there’ so to speak. I am mindful of the fact that I could end up with people already having read most of it before I actually finish it! But hey, if you say it sits well with agents etc to have a following, then it sounds like a good idea to me.

Personally, I am not a writer of any description. I am a 37 year old H&S Manager and have had no formal training other than a writing course that I bought off the internet some years ago, hence my speedy acceptance of your kind offer to review my work!

I am learning all the time (mostly from YWO) and am trying to apply everything that I am learning to what I have written so far, so I hope you understand when you find a plethora of mistakes later on in the book!

As I explained before, I am well aware of the fact that my writing needs a lot of ‘fine tuning’ but I hope eventually to have something in a publishable state. I have been at this book for so long now (I started it almost 10 years ago! And have not touched it for long periods of time, sometimes years) that I decided this year was the year to blow the dust off and finally finish it and move on to something else hopefully. I didn’t have a great deal of time to write before and only ever spent an hour or so here and there on it, but recently, now that I have finished studying/training for work etc I am spending a lot more time on it and receiving positive reviews on YWO is giving me the impetus I need to move it on to a conclusion (I think I may be able to use the angel angle somewhere there too).

So, please be patient with my writing and please do not hesitate to point out where I go wrong, I will take everything on board as I am just so grateful for your giving up your time to help me.

I intend to read your chapters tonight on YWO and will submit a free will review later too, if it helps!

Can’t wait to hear what you think and if you continue to enjoy it. I have some reservations about the whole Diary of murders (this will make sense as you read on) and I am not sure how else to weave them into the plot, so please feel free to comment on that too.

As per previous email, I’ve managed to successfully download Equilibrium, and can’t wait to read it. It makes a welcome change to be reviewing something from choice rather than as an assignment!

A little about myself, to put any commentary in context.

I’m a self-employed tutor / freelance writer with a past record in TV, theatre and journalism and now working on becoming a novelist myself, hence my finding your work on youwriteon.

So a professional writer of sorts, but NOT a novelists’ agent or publisher (I have to jump through the same hoops as you to get that far!).

I’ve just started a new writers’ blog and shall be commending Equilibrium on it. (Obviously as you’ve put your work on youwriteon you’re happy to have it in the public domain.) Being a new blog (I’ve just moved to this area) it won’t have much of a following initially, but hopefully will soon build up, and increase Equilibrium’s public profile.

If you haven’t got a blog yourself I strongly recommend you do so. They can be enormously useful in promoting your work and yourself, with a literally millions worldwide as your potential audience. I would imagine that linking to writers circles and especially chat-groups centred around vampire-style stories would prove enormously beneficial in the long-term. (Demonstrating an on-line following for your work is a sure-fire way to get an agent’s interest!)

Always bear in mind that publishers and agents receive literally hundreds of submissions every week, which is why it is imperative to have a final product as near perfect as it can be, to get someone to give it a second glance and forward it to the next review stage.

As I think I said in my initial review, the reading public’s interest in this genre is beginning to wane, with angels apparently the up and coming theme, but don’t let that worry you. I think Equilibrium, if say published two years down the line (a realistic timescale given you are only two-thirds through), will be ideally placed to capture the hearts and minds of the mid-teen Twilight readership who will by then be late-teen / early twenty-somethings looking for more mature storylines.

Anyway, I shall not distract you from your writing any longer.

I’ll get back to you as and when I can and let you know my thoughts

Best wishes,

Mark

Well, what a long way we have come since then! We have now published 5 full-length novels, 2 anthologies, 2 (s0on to be 3) kids shorts and 9 novella/shorts (although some under a different name) and we are hard at our second Rose Red Rhymeand book 3 of the Rose Red series, as well as many other projects. As you saw earlier, Mark isn’t one for working on one thing at once! 😉

So where do we go from here? Well, the honest answer is, we don’t know. Not for sure. We have a million and one projects bubbling along and one day, hey, we might even finish Book One of the Dark Halo series. That’ll be a day to celebrate when that finally hits the virtual shelves. I originally started that one in 1992! But for now, we will just keep doing what we do. Bringing readers reasonably-priced, quality stories, because our readers deserve the best. Let’s face it, without you, we wouldn’t be having this conversation…